Tourists from foreign countries currently increase for the purpose of, for example, shopping. Tourists, who use foreign languages as their mother tongues, may often bring catalogues into stores to buy articles they want, using the catalogues. In this case, if the articles are unavailable, or if sales assistants want to recommend articles, it is important for the assistants to understand the requests of the tourists who speak foreign languages in order to offer satisfactory services.
As a system for assisting smooth sales activities, a sales assisting apparatus is known which, for example, extracts a keyword from the customer's voice information input thereto, converts the extracted keyword into a weight for an element (such as “price,” “design” or “operability”) associated with the keyword, and retrieves and presents article information based on the conversion result. Actually, however, it is difficult for customers unfamiliar to the system to input their voices thereto. In particular, if the customers speak foreign languages, it is significantly difficult for them to input their voices to the system.
Further, a conversation assisting apparatus for assisting a conversation between persons who speak different languages as their mother tongues is known, in which the speech of only one of the persons is translated into the corresponding speech expressed in the language of the other person, to thereby permit, for example, an option “Yes” or “No” or a map corresponding to the input speech to be presented, and to permit the other person to select or point the presented option or map, thus realizing assist of conversation utilizing the voice input of only one person. However, this prior art is disadvantageous, for example, in that conversation may be stopped after the selection of “Yes” or “No,” or be stopped because, for example, a customer wishes to give an answer other than that presented by the system, but cannot express it. Thus, the customer cannot hold further or smooth conversation they wish. Furthermore, when the customer tries to designate an article or a condition for the article, the sales assistant may be often unable to understand the feature of the designated article and therefore unable to present the article.
Thus, there is no technique of sufficiently assisting conversations associated with services and held between a first person using a first language and a second person using a second language.